New Hampshire Football Report

UNH’s starts from scratch

Allen Lessels
UNH Insider

It’s on.

Captains Casey DeAndrade, Ryan Farrell and Adam Riese led the UNH football team onto Bremner Field, its practice turf, on Tuesday afternoon for its first practice of the start-of-a-new-era 2016 season.

Insider125“It was great to be out there,” said senior defensive end Cam Shorey after practice. “We’ve got a lot of young guys and there’s a lot of excitement coming into the season this year. We didn’t finish the last one the way we wanted to. Everyone’s really excited and we had a lot of juice today.”

The Wildcats finished 7-5 overall last year and earned a spot in the NCAA Division I FCS tournament for the 12th straight season, which is the longest such streak in the country. They lost in the first round after runs to the FCS semifinals each of the two years prior.

The No. 22 Wildcats – the STATS rankings were released Monday afternoon – begin the season with a game at San Diego State, an FBS School, on Saturday, Sept. 3.

The first order of business during fall camp is settling on a starting quarterback.

Senior Adam Riese, a left-hander who started three games last season, has a slight edge in game experience on sophomore Trevor Knight in the quarterback race.

“We’ve got a great quarterback competition that’s really going to be a great thing for all of us,” said head coach Sean McDonnell. “No. 1 priority is to find out who the quarterback is. Both the guys did some good things today. Both the kids have worked extremely hard in the summer from spring. We’ll watch the tape from today and see a little about it. Both did some good things. Both have to pick it up and keep on going.”

There is no timetable on when a starting quarterback will be named.

“We’ll figure it out,” McDonnell said.

The coach liked the looks of Day One.

“Great energy,” he said. “It’s been a long time since we’ve done anything together with a football with these guys and their hard work this summer paid off. They’re in good shape. They’re flying around. They understand what they’ve got to do. It was a good tempo to practice.
It’s exciting.”

Shorey said he had given little thought to the No. 22 ranking.

“Honestly, we were thinking about the first day of practice, haven’t really though much about that,” he said. “If we have a good camp, maybe we’ll start thinking about that stuff. Right now it’s just trying to work on the little stuff. It felt great. We’re just working on fundamentals right now. Get the young guys into the program the rest of us get back into the swing of things.”

*****

The Wildcats were not in the Top 25 in the final STATS poll last season.

They were one of six teams from their league, the Colonial Athletic Association to crack the preseason Top 25.

Richmond was at No. 4, William & Mary was No. 9 and James Madison was No. 12. Villanova pulled down the No. 23 spot and Towson was at No. 24.

*****

Follow Allen Lessels on Twitter: @unhinsider

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